ActionScript :: Flash - Spanish Text Is Not Correctly Encoded?

I have an XML that contains Spanish text. I noticed that when I traced out this XML to a string characters that contain accents where not correctly represented. I tested this by tracing out a single character, "è" and the output is "é"

trace("è"); //outputs é

How is this resolved in ActionScript?

Sample of the XML that is affected:

'<month name="month6"> ' +
'<link.content document-href="tn5684" section-href="tn5687" document-type="SPECIAL-TOPIC" rank="1" link-url="">Bebé prematuro</link.content> ' +
'<link.content document-href="tn8416" section-href="tn8416" document-type="DP-TOPIC" rank="2" link-url="">¿Cómo puedo tomar decisiones informadas sobre mi bebé extremadamente prematuro?</link.content> ' +
'</month> ' +

The text appears in a List Component. I am changing the font around to find one that might work but this is not working. Anyone know how to represent accented characters in a List component?

Update:Loading the XML document from an external file does not have the same problem:

var myXML:XML = new XML();
myXML.load("someXmlFile.xml");
//This works

However I need this xml to be built into the SWF. So am creating the XML from a string:

var xmlString:String = "<root><textNode>bebè</textNode></root>";
var myXML:XML = new XML(xmlString); //This breaks the encoding?!

So I was using Flash Develop to edit the actionscript that contains the xml. This was apparently not encoding the text correctly.